About the Speaker:

Film and TV narratives in India are embedded within contradictions of social and economic inequalities on the one hand alongside a vast array of goods and services available in an increasingly liberalized economy on the other. The urban middle class are cosmopolitan ‘global’ citizens, with a marked pride in ‘Indian-ness’. Witness to increasing crime and corruption; they are equally fascinated by the myriad possibilities of desire and consumption.

Please join us for this special lecture delivered by Charles R. Kaye and Dalip Pathak, both of Warburg Pincus LLC. Warburg Pincus was one of the earliest private equity investors in India, seeing great potential in Indian businesses ranging from telecommunications, financial services, and hardware manufacturing. In March 2005, Warburg Pincus sold a portion of their stake in Bharti Tele-Ventures, now one of the largest providers of mobile telecommunications in India.

Please join us for this special opportunity to hear from, and speak with, The Honorable Ronen Sen, Ambassador of India to the United States, on Wednesday, October 26. Ambassador Sen will offer his views on changing directions in Indo-US relations, and has agreed to an interactive discussion following his opening remarks.

Sunil Bharti Mittal is the Founder, Chairman and Group Managing Director of Bharti Enterprises head quartered at New Delhi, India. Bharti Enterprises, India’s leading telecom conglomerate, has been at the forefront of the telecom revolution and has transformed the telecom sector with its world-class services built on leading edge technologies. Bharti is India’s largest mobile service operator and enjoys a national leadership presence in fixed line services, long distance and broadband services.

Nusrat Durrani is General Manager/SVP of MTV World, a division of MTV created in 2004 to launch new MTV-branded channels that super-serve emerging bi-cultural audiences in the U.S.: MTV Desi for South Asian-Americans, launched in July 2005; MTV Chi for Chinese-Americans launched in December 2005; and MTV K for Korean-Americans planned for 2006.

Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bangalore, who is currently a visiting professor at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Guha's first book was The Unquiet Woods, jointly published by Oxford University Press an the University of California Press in 1989. This is a social history of the Himalayan forests, from the nineteenth century down to the celebrated Chipko movement. In 1999 the OUP and the University of Chicago Press published Guha's Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals and India.

Arun Shourie is among India's best known commentators on current and political affairs. Born in Jalandhar, Punjab (1941), he studied at St. Stephen's College in Delhi and then obtained his doctorate in Economics from Syracuse University, USA.